Posts Tagged: "technology"

The House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet met today to hear from a number of witnesses about the intersection of intellectual property rights and consumers’ right to repair products they own. The concerns voiced by witnesses and congress members today centered around harm and cost to consumers as a result of technological protection measures (TPMs) and increased use of IP tools such as design patents to thwart competition for after-market parts.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday upheld a district court ruling that embedding images from Instagram posts in third-party websites does not constitute copyright infringement. The case has to do with two photographers’ images that were embedded and posted with articles run by Buzzfeed News and Time from the photographers’ public Instagram accounts. The district court and the Ninth Circuit both cited Perfect 10 v. Amazon as precluding relief.

In a precedential decision authored by Judge Tiffany Cunningham on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled that two patents for methods of connecting users based on their answers to polling questions were directed to patent ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. U.S. Patent Nos. 9,087,321 and 10,936,685 are owned by Trinity Info Media, LLC and are titled “Poll-Based Networking System.” The U.S. District court for the Central District of California granted Covalent, Inc.’s motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), finding that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of “matching users who gave corresponding answers to a question” and did not contain an inventive concept.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary yesterday held a hearing featuring Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, who has recently come under fire from the Republican-led House leadership. Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) repeatedly grilled Khan about testimony from the independent assessor for Twitter, Ernst & Young, in the Commission’s recent investigation into the social media platform, which Jordan characterized as “targeted harrassment.”

On July 12, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held its second hearing in two months on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) developments and intellectual property rights. This most recent hearing focused on potential violations of copyright law by generative AI platforms, the impact of those platforms on human creators, and ways in which AI companies can implement technological solutions to protect copyright owners and consumers alike.

Last week, comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI in a U.S. district court, alleging the company’s generative AI product, ChatGPT, infringes on their copyrighted content. In addition to copyright infringement, the trio also claimed that the AI company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition laws and unjustly enriched the company. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of “copying massive amounts of text” used to train ChatGPT to produce new text from prompts. Language models like OpenAI rely on datasets of text or other media to train its generative capabilities.

On July 11, the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), released a policy report advocating for a pro-innovation legislative and administrative agenda to counteract a series of shocks to the U.S. patent system over the past two decades. This pro-innovation agenda has the direct support of several C4IP members who formerly held high-ranking government positions and are now calling on the federal government to correct several areas of patent law that have improperly tilted the playing field in favor of corporate infringers and foreign counterfeiters.

“The true crime in ecommerce fraud is that creators will stop creating.” That grim assessment has driven Jennifer L. Cook of SnakeArts to fight like heck against rampant infringements and counterfeits globally. Her ongoing class action lawsuit against Meta Platforms claims their subsidiary Facebook knowingly permits copyright infringement via advertisements featuring stolen product images from artists. It seems to be in Meta’s best interest to do so: FB generates the bulk of its billions of dollars in annual revenue from advertisements, without regard to the legitimacy of content.

In April, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requested public input on an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM). The Request for Comments (RFC) allowed the public to voice their opinion on the proposed rules, including hundreds of real, authentic inventors. In the past, US Inventor has asked its members to use their voices and write comments for the USPTO’s requests. Typically, these requests generate at least 100 responses from USI’s members. This time, USI decided to level the playing field and give its members a chance to speak as loudly as its adversaries. We generated nearly 2,400 real comments from inventors, patent holders and concerned individuals. 

On Wednesday, July 5, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) released a summary of the responses it has received to its request for views on whether the country’s system for standard essential patents (SEP) is functioning properly. The goal of the request for comments and the subsequent report is to determine whether the UK government needs to make policy changes in this area. The Office received comments on a variety of topics related to SEPs, including the balance of the system, competition, transparency, patent litigation, and more. While both SEP holders and implementers reported problems in the system, the UKIPO found that there was little consensus among stakeholders as to the efficiency of the system and whether government intervention was needed.

A UK judge in May determined in a non-public judgment that has been widely reported on that Apple should pay Optis a total of $56.43 million plus interest for a worldwide FRAND license to Optis’s portfolio of 4G standard essential patents (SEPs). In the most recent development in the overall case, Apple yesterday reportedly lost its appeal in one of the four technical trials pending between the parties, meaning it could still be liable for fees related to infringement in the range of $7 billion.  

Imagine setting sail on a vast ocean, marked by established sea routes governed by mighty, seasoned mariners. These old sea dogs, with their extensive map collections (akin to patents), dominate the waters, leaving little room for new explorers. This is the situation young companies often find themselves in when chartering into territories monopolized by a few dominant players. The networking industry, ruled by giants like Cisco, Huawei, Juniper, Nokia, and Ericsson, mirrors this vast ocean. The waters are thick with “patent thickets” – tangled masses of patent claims, making it hard for fresh-faced voyagers to navigate without infringing on existing patents. Moreover, the sea is marked by “standardization” lighthouses, which while guiding ships towards interoperability and quality, impose limitations on the course of innovation. These beacons can also increase the cost of compliance, posing as formidable reefs blocking the path of emerging vessels.

On June 28, a group of 16 individuals filed a class action complaint in the Northern District of California against generative artificial intelligence (GAI) developer OpenAI on several alleged violations of federal and state law on privacy, unfair business practices and computer fraud. The class action lawsuit’s discussion on property interests in consumer data underscores the intellectual property issues that have arisen since the advent of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, which scrapes personal data and IP-protected material to train its GAI systems.

The UK High Court today issued an Approved Judgment in Interdigital Technology Corporation & Ors v Lenovo Group Ltd [2023] EWHC 1578 (Pat). While Lenovo was declared the “overall winner,” InterDigital was awarded interest, increasing their previous award by $46.2 million. In March, the Hon. Mr Justice Mellor issued a judgment ordering Lenovo to pay InterDigital a lump sum of $138.7 million for a global FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) license covering sales of cellular devices from 2007 to December 31, 2023. It was the second full FRAND trial to be decided by the UK courts, following the landmark Unwired Planet case.

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) revolution the world is currently experiencing is powered by data. But what exactly are “data” and how can we make the term fit for use in the complex landscape of generative AI? In simple terms, data in this context can be any digitally formatted information. However, there is an inconsistency in the usage and understanding of the term when it comes to what is encompassed in a dataset used for training a generative AI model. Often, there is metadata or even identifiable information which, although possibly unintended, ends up being part of the training data. There can also be legal implications linked to the data, including systems trained on copyrighted or licensed works, or, for example, systems trained with any visual or textual information containing personal health information.